The present invention relates to an elimination work simulator, and in particular, to an elimination work simulator capable of storing data of a shape or contour as a final result of the work and data of a shape as an intermediate result of the work.
A conventional elimination work simulator apparatus has been described in pages 120 to 147 of the Computer Graphics And Image Processing 19, (1982). In this article, there is described an example in which a space data format called an octtree is applied to a numeric control (NC) work simulator. Although a method of computing a contour or shape as a result of a work has been described, a preservation or storage of the simulation result, particularly, the handling of information about intermediate results of the simulation has not been described.
In addition, a conventional elimination work simulator apparatus has been described also in pages 15 to 20 of the ACM Siggraph '86, Volume 20, Number 4. In this article, an operation of sets and a display operation are achieved by use of a data store method called DEXEL; however, since the result of the operation of sets is updated for each work operation in this processing, the intermediate results of the simulation are not preserved.
Referring now to the flowchart of FIG. 20, a flow of processing effected in a conventional elimination work simulator apparatus will be described. In the description, it is assumed that, when a work is effected in m work operation units of a working or machining device, work object space data associated with the work object or workpiece to be worked in a j-th work operation unit is represented as W.sub.j-1 and work space data is expressed as T.sub.j.
First, in step H20, an initial value W.sub.0 of the work object space data is supplied to work object space data store means. Next, in step H22, operation data is inputted to each work operation unit so as to generate working space data T.sub.j. Furthermore, step H25 effects an operation to attain a difference between the work object space data W.sub.j-1 associated with the preceding work and the work space data T.sub.j generated in the step H22 and then step 26 updates the result of the step H25 to attain new work object space data; thereafter, the result of the update is displayed in step H28.
In general, when performing a visual check on the appearance or state of a work object of an elimination work conducted by an elimination work simulator, if the display indicates a failure of work object space data up to a certain work operation unit, it is desirable to determine, in a short period of time, in which one of the work operation units a work failure has been caused and to display the work state for each work operation unit. In order to satisfy such a requirement, it is naturally necessary that the changing state of the work object in the elimination work simulator can be continuously displayed in the forward direction of the work operation as well as in the backward direction thereof; furthermore, that the work state of an arbitrary work operation unit can be directly displayed. However, in the conventional elimination work simulator described above, only the forward-directional processing is effected and hence in order to redisplay a state of a work object in a work operation unit i which precedes the present work operation unit j, the entire processing ranging from the first work operation unit to the (i-1)-th work operation unit is required to be executed again. In consequence, the prior art apparatus is attended with a problem that it takes a long period of time to redisplay the state of the work object in the work operation unit i. As a simple method to solve this problem, there is considered a method in which the work object space data W.sub.j attained in each work operation unit is preserved so as to display the whole or a part of the data when necessary. In this case, there arises a problem that the capacity of the storage required for this operation is considerably increased.